Interesting topic… I’m working in this industry myself and I don’t agree about this in 100%, but I added your page to my bookmarks and hope to see more interesting articles in the future…

Of the 93 women and nine men included in this study, 80 percent (80%) of the women and all of the men reported sexual problems in their adult life.

Research indicates that 46 percent (46%) of children who are raped are victims of family members. (Langan and Harlow, 1994.)
The percentage are actually much higher since most case are not documented. Also the documents are researched in 1994. The percentage are said to be increased.

Eleven percent (11%) of rape victims are raped by their fathers or step-fathers, and another 16 percent (16%) are raped by other relatives. The percentage may not be in the 80% ranges, but it’s up there.
The sad part is the media ignores relative rape cases and focus most of the attention on a social network such as Myspace. Parents ignore that children can also be endanger in their own home by someone they trust.

The moves by MySpace to “police” the site seem more like a News Corp PR exercise than a properly thought-out strategy for protecting children online. If young users feel themselves observed, it seems very likely they’ll simply defect to a new site where they are not observed. The launch of social networking sites intended for a global audience but hosted in e.g. Jamaica is something that TechCrunch has noted recently - see http://www.techcrunch.com/tag/SmutVibes.

The above example is relatively niche, but it seems virtually inevitable that a more general-purpose social networking site like MySpace will launch in Jamaica or Russia or somewhere generally less litigious than the US. If MySpace insists on policing the activities of its younger users, thus hastening their defection to a site completely unmoderated and extra-territorial to evade that unwelcome intrusion, the onus will be back on the parents to look after their kids. So I’m very much in agreement with DotsMedia - trying to force MySpace to act in loco parentis will only drive the users somewhere less savoury, and responsibility ultimately has to devolve to the parents either way.

Lol. Now nobody on TC will ever take you seriously.

If you notice most of the AOL, yahoo, and msn chat rooms are full of porn advertisers, child predators, adults and undercover cops. Ever since Myspace became popular many teenagers are often not use chat rooms as often as before. Social networks have changed the way teenagers communicate with friends online. If Myspace turns into AOL, msn and yahoo chat rooms with undercover cops patrolling the site then many teens will get turn off and eventually switch to another social site.

Speaking from a Myspace user, I’m safe to say that many loyal Myspace young users often are not in support of undercover cops patrolling the site. Teens prefer not to have cops patrolling their personal space and Myspace is consider a personal space for many teens.

http://www.adotas.com/2006/06/.....-for-kids/

“That’s like saying that the corner store can put porn on the shelf next to the bread and its the parents responsibility to shield the kid, so don’t let him run an errand to the store. ”

I’m from the UK. Most corner newsagents DO sell porn. The responisbility here comes in two parts: the responsibility of the parents for their children’s actions and the responisibilty of the shop owner for keeping an eye on his store. What the newsagents ended up doing was just putting the porn on the top shelf so the kids couldn’t get to it. Wouldn’t myspace be more sensible to do something like this instead? If your account has adult content or is “adult ariented” it can only be accessed by users over 18? It doesn’t sound like it would be a tough thing to code.

In the 1980’s there was a huge battle over censorship of records. They came up with the idea of labeling records which may contain objectionable subject matter. One side of the argument rallied behind the cries of free-speech, the other side of the fence said that labeling records would hurt record sales.

Labeling seemed to fix this for both sides. You can still exercise free speech; you just have to tell people if your speech is for adults only. The labels did not hurt record sales, but a parent could quickly look at a record and decide if they needed to take a closer look.

Now onto the MySpace issue. First of all, MySpace should not be liable for children meeting adults through their site, that is ridiculous. However, the restrictions they are placing are fairly minimal. You have to know the minors complete name, not just their screen name. So brothers and sisters can talk, because presumably they would know each other’s full names.

Secondly, as a parent it is my duty to track my kids and know what they are doing. However, when my kid goes to the movies I can rely on the movie ratings board to set ratting by recognized standards and the movie theater to enforce those ratings.

If movies work this way why not social-networking sites?

Let’s set up a rating system and rate the pages on MySpace, then I will be able to tell pretty easily what my kid can visit. Right now I simply do not let her on MySpace, but if I could set up an account for her and limit, by ratings, what she is going to be able to see - then I could allow her there. So this is one customer MySpace is loosing because they don’t have security practices in place.

I am not shirking my responsibilities, on the contrary, the only way, currently, for me to meet my responsibilities adequately is to disallow her visiting the site all together. However if they took some more precautions then I could allow her there, and not be shirking my responsibilities.

Henry Blodget dissected the hype surrounding MySpace yesterday. Toward the end of the post, he touches MySpace’s present fundamental structural problem - it’s too scary to advertisers….